Persistent buggers: how The Spectator fought to decriminalise homosexuality

Fifty years ago today, on 27 July 1967, the Sexual Offences Act received royal assent, at last decriminalising male homosexuality – for those over 21 in England and Wales, anyway. The credit for finally getting the bill through Parliament is due to Harold Wilson’s Labour government, inspired by the strenuous efforts of the Labour MP Leo Abse, and the Conservative peer Arthur Gore, 8^th Earl of Arran. However, a journalistic campaign to overturn an unjust and unworkable law began with The Spectator, which had for the previous dozen years been the lead supporter of the cause in the press.

After the dust settled in post-War Britain, disparate members of the Houses of Parliament held the sincere but mostly tacit belief that the law criminalising homosexuality desperately needed amendment, if not scrapping entirely. The Spectator was swift to champion the major recommendation of the Wolfenden Report of 1957 that homosexuality be legalised in private between adults over 21.